Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

Contents

Introduction: From Hope To Harambe

What changed between the elections of 2008 and 2016?

How did the same status markers that earned Barack Obama genuine praise and admiration earn Hillary Clinton online mockery?

Trace the period from 2008 to 2016 from the perspective of online cultures and subcultures

Trace the new culture wars

Don't involve young people rebelling against an older cohort

Alliances are much more jumbled

Much more difficult to discern participants' true political views

Death of the mainstream liberal mass culture

The only thing that seems to unite all online activists (whether right or left) is their hatred of "mainstream"

Many average voters hold the mainstream media in contempt

This new online culture of memes and in-jokes is the result of the further democratization of speech and publishing by the Internet

However, this is not what many online pioneers had hoped would result as a result of this democratization

Instead of more long-form pieces and investigative journalism, we got Twitter and dank memes

We can trace the beginnings of this new online culture to Kony 2012

The first activist viral video

Sought to draw attention to war crimes being perpetrated by Joseph Kony in Uganda

Was reshared numerous times on Facebook and Twitter by young, mainly liberal people engaging in virtue signalling

Backlash

"Slactivism"/"clicktivism" - people thought that merely resharing the video would help stop Kony from perpetrating his war crimes

Video was criticized for oversimplifying and containing inaccuracies

Criticism for focus on filmmaker rather than Kony's victims

Then the filmmaker has a nervous breakdown, itself caught on video, adding another layer to the media frenzy

Kony 2012 sets the template for many of the memes and fads that follow

Earnest idealistic content shared online

Content becomes "viral"; is reshared many times on social media

Increasing popularity causes people to dig deeper, and they find out that the cause isn't as idealistic as it appears on the surface

This leads to a backlash of cynicism and irony, leading to the public humiliation of the person who originally created or shared that content

Repeated iterations of this cycle lead to the formation of a deep reservoir of cynicism and ironic detachment

This is brought into focus by the reaction to the death of Harambe

Harambe was a gorilla that was killed by zookeepers after he dragged a child who had fallen into his enclosure

The death of Harambe started the normal social media activism cycle, with many petitioning to have the parents held responsible for the death of the gorilla

However, this led to a nigh-instant backlash against the social media spectacle

Using Harambe as a joke became a way fro those who where tired with ultra-serious left-wing self-righteous social media sentimentality to poke fun at it

The blizzard of Harambe memes became a way for those with actually racist views to compare black celebrities to Harambe, while appearing to take part in poking fun at the faux-hysterics of liberal social media culture

Online culture wars form an ironic in-joke-y maze of meanings where every new event, identity and subcultural behavior can be understood as a response to something else

People posting Trump memes are motivated to make their memes more edgy and toxic because they're entertained by the reactions of genderqueer "otherkin" on Tumblr

This leads to more earnest responses about how "mainstream heteronormative culture" continues to "oppress" online subcultures, which leads to further escalation

This escalation leads to the creation of "call-out culture" on social media, where people are afraid to share their political or social views for fear of being labeled "problematic"

Because the online ultra-left labeled everything that wasn't 100% aligned with them as "racist" and "white-supremacist", their warnings about people with actual racist and white-supremacist views went unheeded

As a result Trump was able to get away with not responding to many of the criticisms of his campaign simply because the people making the criticisms had lost their credibility with large parts of the voting public

Chapter 1: The Leaderless Digital Counter-revolution

In the early 2010s, there was a new wave of cyber-utopianism

Arab Spring

Occupy

Anonymous hacktivism

Wikileaks

New leaderless forms of digital cyber-revolution

However, these revolutions either failed or turned ugly

Arab Spring leads to the rise of Islamist movements

Occupy Wall Street never develops a political ideology and is forced out, encampment by encampment

Ukraine - protests quickly turn violent

Moreover, there is nothing suggesting that these leaderless cyber-movements have to support liberal causes

The alt-right starts as an overtly segregationist and white-nationalist movement, intent on creating an "alternative" to the traditional conservative establishment

In order to justify these values, the alt-right gains deeper intellectual justification from "neoreactionary" writers like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land who question Enlightenment values

Argue that social progress is orthogonal to material progress/progress in the hard sciences

Argue that social values have, in fact, been regressing since the Enlightenment

Advocate a return to pre-Enlightenment social values while maintaining scientific and material progress

The key nexus between the reactionary right and online trolls was GamerGate

What was GamerGate

Started out with reviews of Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest

Depression Quest was not a very good game

Embodied some of the worst tropes of online hyper-leftism

Attacks on Zoe Quinn's game quickly escalated into attacks on Zoe Quinn herself

Online trolls joined with right-wing anti-feminists to defend the culture of video games against do-gooder liberals who sought to make the gaming subculture more like the mainstream

GamerGate proves to be the link that allows alt-right ideology to influence the heretofore inchoate politics of online trolls

Much of the online alt-right aligned media known as the alt-light is a result of GamerGate

Things could have gone differently

Prior to GamerGate, most online anarchism was vaguely leftist

EFF, GNU and many other institutions advocating for cyber-libertarianism have vaguely leftist ideology

Instead, online trolling becomes preoccupied with the perceived emasculation of western culture by liberalism in general and feminism in particular

Eventually trolls start to turn their online words into offline action

Attacks on women

Attacks on minorities

Attacks preceded by specific warnings on 4Chan and other anonymous spaces

The left assumed that it was inevitable that the new online leaderless protest movements of the 21st century would espouse liberal values and was not prepared to defend these values when that turned out not to be the case

Chapter 2: The Online Politics of Transgression

Transgression has been a liberal virtue in the West since the '60s

This virtue has now been embraced by the right

Use of swastikas initially had more to do with "punk" culture and giving deliberate shock or offense to conventional moral sensibilities than it did with actual Nazi sympathies

Online culture venerated transgressive protagonists like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho or Tyler Durden from Fight Club

Draws inspiration from mid-20th century counterculture, which viewed insanity as a rejection of social norms and a source of creative inspiration

An early example of the online culture of transgressivism comes from the phrase an hero and 4Chan's attitudes towards suicide

The phrase an hero comes from a grammatical error left by a commenter on Mitchell Henderson's Facebook page

Mitchell Henderson was a schoolboy who committed suicide

The combination of the extremely earnest, heartfelt sentiment and grammatical error was hilarious to 4Chan

The phrase "an hero" became a meme, and was used to mock those expressing suicidal tendencies online

4Chan rejects the mainstream sentimentality around suicide and instead replaces it with "its own dark spectacle, where pity is replaced with cruelty"

Online transgressivism has its roots in Nietzsche's morality, which emphasized the discarding of traditional norms and which characterized Christianity as "slave morality"

Online transgression can be seen as an expression of the Romantic critique of everyday life - everyday ennui and boredom requires a counterforce of extreme transgression

4Chan embodies the "carnivalesque grotesque as a critique of mainstream ideology"

However, the mainstream ideology when 4Chan developed its politics was left-wing, so its critiques tend to be right-wing

Un-PC poor taste, rudeness, shock, trolling

In the first iteration of the culture wars, the transgressives were on the left, and their critics were on the right

Now, it's the transgressives on the right and their critics on the left

Transgressivism, as a style, isn't necessarily associated with any particular ideology

Ideologies which once embraced transgression (i.e. feminism) now reject it, since it's their values that are being transgressed upon

Feminism embraced transgression in the '60s, but was rejecting it by the '80s

Chan culture embraces the values of de Sade, rebelling against conventional moral and sexual norms

The emergence of the online right is the apotheosis of the transgressivist movement pioneered by the counterculture of the '60s

Chapter 3: Gramscians of the Alt-Light

The chief apologists for the alt-right, initially, were Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari

This is also something we see a lot in Moldbug's writings re: "The Cathedral"

Prior to 1968, the Right took for granted that the populace was inherently conservative ("silent majority") and all that was required was to get politicians that accurately reflected this inherent conservatism

Gramscians were the first to acknowledge that the culture had become more liberal, and thus politicians that accurately reflected the culture would also be liberal

Gramscians thus focused on cultural change, and felt that political change would follow naturally after the culture had been changed

Andrew Hartman - The War for the Soul of America

The rise of the New Left and the disorder of 1968 signaled that the entire culture would have to be retaken before political change could be effected

Thus, the New Right set about changing the culture, rather than engaging in political advocacy as a faction of traditionally conservative parties

Today, the heirs to that New Right tradition is the "alt-light"

Bridge between mainstream Trumpism and the alt-right

Movement entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton Window

Was fired after an interview surfaced where he defended pederasty - too controversial even for Breitbart

Mike Cernovich

Publishes popular guides to alt-right politics and male assertiveness

Danger And Play - references Nietzsche quote referring to women as "dangerous playthings"

Alex Jones

Infowars

Claims that there is a new world order being created by a globalist conspiracy

Believes the moon landing was faked and that 9/11 and Oklahoma City were staged by the US government

Believes that school shootings are faked in order to drive anti-gun sentiment

Richard Spencer

One of the only white-nationalist figures to rival "alt-light" figures in terms of popularity

Believes that the US should undergo "peaceful ethnic cleansing"

Dapper, well-spoken style defies stereotypes about white nationalists

Wants "blood-and-soil" conservatism in the style of European far-right parties

Believes that alt-right views will continue to infiltrate mainstream politics through culture

Most explicit Gramscian of the the alt-right figures

Believes that Trump is both a sign of and a catalyst for the collapse of the multicultural liberal order

While the alt-light was united (don't punch to the right) while it was in opposition, divisions have started to appear now that they're in power

Mike Cernovich broke publicly with Richard Spencer after Spencer was filmed making a Nazi salute and shouting "Hail Trump"

The success of the above figures shows that the right has caught up to and surpassed the left in its appreciation for and application of leftist ideas about media and culture

Chapter 4: Conservative Culture Wars from Buchanan to Yiannopoulos

Where does the alt-right fit in with historical conservatism?

Over the past half-century, politics has been hollowed out - become more about culture than policy

Trump is merely the apotheosis of this trend

Trump is also exceptional in that he's the first conservative to win by exploiting this trend

Milo Yiannopoulos likes to compare Trump to Pat Buchanan

Says that Trump is the first "purely cultural" candidate since Pat Buchanan

But how much do the alt-right have in common with Buchanan's culture-warriors?

Pat Buchanan led the "paleoconservatives"

Death of the West

Defined by opposition to the "globalist, interventionist, open-borders" neoconservative agenda

Buchanan sought to define American conservatism as more than anti-Communism

Pushed back against the cultural left on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, art, censorship, evolution, family values, feminism, pornography, etc.

Buchanan called for conservatives to engage in a larger cultural struggle

Milo's style combines the politics of conservatism with the taboo-busting culture of online trolls

According to his detractors on the right, Milo's actual policies are little more than traditional liberalism

Far removed from the buttoned-down family values style associated with the term "conservative"

Milo's rise represents the triumph of the '60s-left counterculture tactics of transgression

Identity politics tactics now used by both the right and the left

The alt-right today is characterized by the libertinism, postmodernism and nihilism that characterized the left in the '60s

Embodies the non-conformist ideals once advocated by the New Left

The alt-right can also be defined by its opposition to traditional conservatism as well as liberalism

Traditional conservatives are called "cuckservatives"

Seen as a cuckolded husband to the "rapacious non-white enemy"

Reserve particular scorn for neoconservatives

Neoconservative emphasis on economic policies that hurt lower-class workers and relative silence on social norms is exactly the opposite of alt-right beliefs

The alt-right represents one of the periodic realignments of the American political system

In the 20th century class-politics and social liberalism were the domain of the left

Free-market economics and social conservatism were the domain of the right

However, there is no rule by which these values have to be paired up in this way

The alt-right combines class politics and social conservatism in the manner of William Jennings Bryan

This rearrangement was foreseen by Herbert Marcuse, who said that as conditions improved for the proletariat, they ceased being revolutionary and instead became reactionary in order to protect what they already had

The alt-right has also co-opted the postmodernist left's use of irony and cultural references in its writing

The alt-right and paleoconservatives are unified in their hatred of feminism

However, paleoconservatives are also opposed to gay rights, whereas the alt-right is neutral-to-friendly on that score

The alt-right and the paleoconservatives also differ on their views of pornography and free-speech

The alt-right is united more by its desire to destroy progressive cultural institutions than it is by any particular vision of conservative society to fall back to

While many paleoconservatives did eventually back Trump, Trump's rise is not evidence for a reprise of paleoconservatism

The support of paleoconservatives is tactical - they see the alt-right as the best way to advance (some of) their ideas

The rise of the alt-right is evidence of the total victory of the politics of irreverence, non-conformism and identity that began in the '60s

Chapter 5: From Tumblr to the Campus Wars: Creating Scarcity in an Online Economy of Virtue

One explanation for the emergence of this new right-wing sensibility is that it emerged in opposition to left-wing identity politics seen on platforms like Tumblr

Users on these platforms tried to shut down right-wing speech while simultaneously moving the Overton window left on issues of race and gender

Normalize anti-male, anti-white, anti-cis rhetoric on the left

Hypersensitive, in contrast to the the willful offensiveness of chan culture, but equally subcultural and transgressive in its own way

Trump's election exposed divisions in the left

Liberal left vs. materialist left

People who supported the left on economic issues hit back at the "woke" identity politics that they thought led to Hillary's defeat

Spoon theory is a metaphor to describe disabilities without outward appearances

You have a finite number of "spoons"

Every time you complete an activity, you lose a spoon

When you're out of spoons, you're completely exhausted and you can't do anything

Spoonies prominently displayed spoon-themed jewelry or tattoos and lashed out at anyone who didn't react appropriately to their undiagnosed or undiagnosable illnesses

Another core characteristic of the online left is self-flagellation

Checking one's "privilege" - shorthand term to acknowledge and apologize for the unearned privileges that one has as a consequence of their race, gender, etc

However, despite the explicit humility and self-flagellation, the online left is as vicious in its own way as the online right

The schism between more "traditional" leftists and the new identitarian leftist ideology of Tumblr was brought into focus by Mark Fisher's essay, Exiting The Vampire Castle

Essay led to years of mass abuse, accusations of misogyny and racism

Fisher was the victim of a "call-out" culture, consisting of performative vulnerability, self-righteous wokeness and bullying

The purpose of call-out culture is to create scarcity in a social sphere where virtue is currency

The other major social media network shaping online liberalism was Twitter

Minor celebrities quickly realized that they could gain more followers and attention by snarkily pointing out racism or sexism than through more traditional media channels

However, when everyone is trying to point out their own virtue, the value of the signal drops

Therefore, there was a cultural shift to try to purge those who were "faking" or being insincere, which led to the current call-out culture

This explains why leftists are more targeted by call-outs - they're the ones with "virtue" to lose

This effort to preserve the scarcity of virtue was especially prominent in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting

Even though the coverage was sympathetic to Hispanic community and the gay community, people on Twitter still found objections

Use of "Latino/Latina" rather than "Latinx"

Some claimed that it was the shooter's mental illness rather than his allegiance to radical Islam that caused the shooting

Others on the left countered by saying that suggesting that mental illness had anything to do with the shooter's motivations was "ableist"

The initial spillover from the online fringe onto offline culture was over the phenomenon of trigger-warnings

Trigger warnings (content warnings) started out as warnings on blog posts or Tumblr posts that discussed potentially distressing material

However, offline, people started requesting trigger warnings on anything distressing, including the expression of non-mainstream liberal opinions like, "There are only two genders"

Germain Greer

Feminist activist

Was scheduled to give a speech at Cardiff University regarding women and power

However the talk was canceled after people claimed that Greer was against transgender people

Claimed that Greer was a TERF: Trans-exclusionary radical feminist

Greer had not published any remarks on transgenderism in 15 years and claimed that it wasn't her issue

Peter Tatchell

Was scheduled to speak alongside Fran Cowling at Canterbury Christ Church University

Talk was canceled after Fran Cowling claimed that Tatchell was racist, Islamophobic and transphobic

Evidence was Tatchell's signing of an open letter supporting free speech

Maryam Namazie

Iranian socialist and feminist

Invited to speak at Goldsmiths University

Speech was repeatedly interrupted by students from the Islamic Society

However, rather than defend her, the other left-wing student groups turned on her

Jordan Peterson

Refused to approve a petition calling for the replacement of he/she and him/her with ze/zir

Had locks glued shut

Was drowned out by a white-noise machine when speaking

Laura Kipnis

Had complaints filed against her for writing an article criticizing "sexual paranoia" on college campuses

While alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos were figuring out how to leverage these attacks into further fame and fortune, leftist figures tended to be cowed or rendered apologetic by these attacks

Tumblrization of politics resulted in a brain drain that has done real damage to the left

These new disputes are a new phase in the campus wars of the late '80s and '90s

Highlighted in books like

The Closing of the American Mind

Illiberal Education

Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

Has its origins in the relativism of writers like Stanley Fish

Even in this earlier phase, there were critiques of moral relativism on the left

Bloom and Paglia - relativistic thinking is the road to nihilism

Although the alt-right and their allies carry some of the ideas of traditional conservatives, their style and ideology much more closely resembles the leftist critics of the radical left identity politics

Chapter 6: Entering the Manosphere

The alt-right is closely associated with a set of masculinist anti-feminist policies known as "The Manosphere"

Men's liberation grew out of the same '60s counterculture that led to 2nd wave feminism

Grew increasingly anti-feminist as feminism began to make more general critiques of culture

Critiques of traditional men's gender roles gave way to celebrations of masculinity

Feminism becomes the political enemy

Reject male privilege and focus on areas where men are discriminated against, like family courts

This new anti-feminism took on a more virulent tone in the 2010s

Use the metaphor of "the red pill" from the Matrix to describe their awakening into anti-feminism

Obsession with "beta" vs. "alpha" males

Idea that women only prefer dominant males

See entire world as a social hierarchy

See "game" and pickup artist tactics as a way to go from being "submissive betas" to "dominant alphas"

One of the chief authors of pickup artistry and "game" is Roosh V

Real name: Daryush Valizadeh

Wrote a series of books called Bang, in which he detailed his tactics to get sex

Runs the anti-feminist website Return of Kings

Another prominent manosphere author is Paul Elam

Runs A Voice For Men

Also ran RegisterHer - a site where men could dox and register women that had wronged them

Saw Trump's win as a win for the men's rights movement

There is significant cross-over between the alt-right and the men's rights movement

Chateu Heartiste

Run by James Weidmann

Mixes evolutionary psychology, anti-feminism and white-advocacy

Argues that white civilization is being undermined by miscegenation, immigration, and low birth rates

Vox Day

Another alt-right anti-feminist

Author of SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police

Early supporter of GamerGate

Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW)

Men who are eschewing romantic relationships in protest against a culture "destroyed by feminism"

Focus on individual achievement and goals

Women are worthless and mindlessly led by biological impulses

Marriage should be boycotted

Proud Boys

Founded by Gavin McInnes

Focus on traditional male roles

Anti-pornography

Socially conservative, seeking to restore traditional gender roles

"Throw down bricks" - approach women in real life

Men's rights spaces have contradictory goals

Want benefits of tradition without its restraints and duties

Proud Boys say they're for a return to a more traditional lifestyle, but they're led by a partying hipster hedonist

F. Roger Devlin

Alt-right writer

"Sexual Utopia In Power"

"The breakdown of monogamy has resulted in promiscuity for the few and loneliness for the majority"

Decline of lifelong marriage and traditional norms has brought with it a steep sexual hierarchy

Growing levels of choice for elite men and increased levels of celibacy for those at the bottom of the pecking order

This relentless rejection brings causes bitterness, and that turns into support for misogynistic ideals when combined with social Darwinist ideas from the alt-right

These ideas translated into real-life action when Eliot Rodger attempted to attack a sorority house in UC Santa Barbara

Complained bitterly about his own lack of romantic success and how he was affected by seeing those he considered inferior to be having more romantic success than him

Chapter 7: Basic Bitches, Normies and the Lamestream

The framing of the alt-right as a movement of "ordinary people" reacting against "elites" obscures the elitism of the alt-right itself

Before adopting the narrative that put them as the champions of the common person against the liberal elites, the alt-right was more than happy to consider the mainstream a bunch of sheep led astray by liberal narratives

One of the most prominent features of alt-right discourse is misanthropy and anxiety over breeding of the "lower orders"

Initially the reaction towards this was condemnation from the right and celebration from the left

The right saw places like 4-chan and reddit as being the embodiment of the "internet hate machine"

Saw it as the logical end of a trend of coarsening culture

The academic left, in turn, saw these places as expressions of subcultural rebellion against an oppressive and hegemonic mainstream

4-chan's culture has always been racist and misogynistic, but academic liberals were willing to overlook that and mine it for trendy research

Birmingham school of subcultural studies

Insufficiently critical of the ideologies of the subcultures they study

Biases tend to agree with the countercultural discourse of their subjects

Cultural capital used to be earned by being urbane and well-mannered

Subcultural capital is earned by using the right argot and being "in the know" - informed about the latest trends and memes

Part of the misogyny of online subcultures comes from the association of feminine traits with the broad masses

Rejection of feminine is as much a rejection of the mainstream as it as rejection of feminine values themselves

Women are seen as a force bringing the inauthenticity of mainstream platforms into subcultural spaces

Hearkens back to the mythos of the domesticating feminine

The rhetoric of much of the alt-right echoes movies and media like Fight Club, where feminine values are seen as decadent and symbols of a declining civilization

The alt-right combines the pop-cultural values of subversion, transgression and counterculture with Nietzchean anti-moralism

Instead of trying to fight the alt-right on their own terms by trying to be edgier than they are, maybe we should reflect on whether edginess and transgression is something that should be aspired to at all

The viciousness and hatefulness of the online identitarian left opened moral space for the alt-right

The online right has shown that it can wield the weapon of online mobs far more effectively than the left can

Yet, rather than realize that it can't win against the alt-right by using the tools of speech suppression the left doubles down on those tactics and eventually resorts to violence to suppress right-wing speech

This creates further moral space for the alt-right to transgress further, and further alienates those in the middle who might have been supportive of leftist ideals

The left has lost the ability to meaningfully argue with people due to the profound intellectual rot caused by calls for greater and greater ideological purity

Thus trolls like Milo Yiannapoulos can challenge the left to a debate of ideas, confident that no one can eloquently defend leftist ideas against them

Progressives have gone from praising the emergence of online political movements into offline spaces to hoping that the Internet can contain such movements